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Stephen Mitchell's book, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, is a landmark statement for psychoanalytic theory, and especially of the place of relational theory. It stands outside and above the field, viewing developments over the century since Freud began his explorations. Mitchell has his own point of view, one introduced in the earlier book he co-authored with Greenberg, Object Relations in Psychoanalysis (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). Building on that previous scholarly statement and contrasting of the positions of many psychoanalytic theorists, he now compares each of the major positions of psychoanalytic theory specifically to the new model he proposes, which he calls a “relational-conflict model.” This model is neither the “drive-conflict” model derived centrally from Freud, nor the “developmental-arrest” model that Mitchell associates with Winnicott and Kohut. Mitchell's model is closest to those proposed by Fairbairn and Racker, but he also relies heavily on Sullivan, Loewald, Schafer, and other modern writers who have contributed to a view of the individual as centered in the human environment and interactive with it.
Mitchell has put himself squarely in the middle of a position that many of us embrace. He describes the situation of many analysts who feel their work to be imprisoned in a procrustean bed of “classical theory.” The theoretical bed will not stretch to fit the expanding data about human development, while the patients will not shrink to fit its limited framework. Psychoanalysis is now consumed with the task of locating a new theoretical core. Psychoanalysis struggles with whether to center on a relational core of human motivation or